Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II @ 16mm, F16, 1/3 sec, ISO 100

Once a thriving diamond-mining center, today the town of Kolmanskop is one of the main photographic attractions in Namibia. The Namib Desert has been reclaiming this ghost town since its abandonment more than half a century ago, and witnessing the amazingly-preserved buildings getting swallowed by the sand dunes is an unforgettable experience.

I visited Kolmanskop earlier this year, while preparing for my 'Desert Storm' Namibia workshop, and I was completely stunned by the photographic potential of the place. In this article I wish to share my experience and images with you.

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II @ 16mm, F16, 1/5 sec, ISO 100

In 1908, a worker by the name of Zacharias Lewala found a shiny stone while working and showed it to his supervisor. The stone was a diamond. Driven by the promise of enormous potential gain, miners rushed to the area, and their wealth sparked a building spree.

Most of the early miners were German and built Kolmanskop in the style of a German town. Among large, extravagant villas it is also possible to find a hospital, a ballroom, a power station and even the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere! At its peak the town housed nearly 1,200 residents from some 700 families.

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 1/40 sec, ISO 100

As quickly as it was built, the town declined following after World War I, when the diamond field became exhausted, and it was completely abandoned by 1954. As witness accounts describe, “One day Kolmanskop's sand-clearing squad failed to turn up, the ice man stayed away, and the school bell stopped ringing.”

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm f2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 1/6 sec, ISO 100

Since then, the Namib Desert has been reclaiming the town, and today the buildings, preserved thanks to the dry climate, are home to sand dunes, beetles and other wildlife.

In the last decades, Kolmanskop has become an important photographic destination to those visiting Namibia. There's something extremely attractive about the colorful rooms, once home to rich miners, now decaying and filling with sand.

Kolmanskop is the perfect place to take advantage of a high dynamic range sensor, like that of the Sony A7R. This image was nearly dark and I brightened the shadows quite a lot, thus avoiding a very difficult HDR processing.

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 1.6 sec, ISO 100

The photographic potential of the town is simply huge. With most windows and doors blown away by the winds, one can make interesting use of any kind of light. The moving sun creates all shapes and forms and interacts with the sand in beautiful ways. Once soft morning light penetrates a room, it shines and accentuates colors and patterns.

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 0.6 sec, ISO 100

Even though it's been photographed a lot, there's always something special to be found. Just be aware that you might need to crawl on your hands and knees to get to a less-accessed room or corridor!

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 1/40 sec, ISO 100

One of the best things about shooting in Kolmanskop is that there's no need to restrict yourself to soft morning or afternoon light. Harsh, midday light penetrates the latticed roof of some of the buildings, creating kaleidoscopic patterns that interact beautifully with the hauntingly-symmetrical architecture.

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 1/3 sec, ISO 100

Harsh light can also create extreme lens-flare. I seldom use flare as a compositional element, but here I couldn't resist the temptation!

Ghost Town: Shooting in Kolmanskop

Sony A7R, Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II, @ 16mm, F16, 0.8 sec, ISO 100

The differently-colored rooms interact with the doors, windows and furniture. Add the sand dunes and light, and you can get surreal imagery.

These photos are great! They evoke a real sense of timelessness, or rather the impact of time. I would get into the composition, tone etc...but really that stuff doesn't matter at all. What matters is that you took some great photos and you should be proud of that! Consider me a fan.

Thanks for all your kind comments guys! I appreciate the feedback.Some of the comments did, however, remind me of the old joke: how many photographers does it take to change a light bulb? 50. One to actually change it, and 49 to say they could've done it :)

Excellent interpretation of Kolmanskop. My wife and I were there last year and I looked forward to this very much. But somehow, I did not get close to finding these kind of views. Having had a set daily programme, we did not have the luxury of choosing the right time of day, and had limited time - sure, this is part of what distinguishes a winning photo AND a professional photographer. But still, I am envious :-).

I first saw images of this abandoned town through the work of world renown photographer Freeman Patterson. Perhaps someone had photographed there before him, but his compositional approach to making photographs within the buildings are the ones that have been countlessly imitated over the years. That being said many great images are still being made here by a new generation of photographers.

Excellent shots all - very envious! I visited Kolmanskop in August of this year and sad to say my work was not of this quality!

Only had about an hour and a half to grab as many shots as possible and it's the kind of place you could spend all day, watching things change inside the buildings as the sun moves round...

Still, it's a evocative place to visit and well with the trip down to the SW of Namibia, even if you don't come away with pictures like these. I also agree that it isn't nearly as photogenic from the outside.

Beautiful and very tastefully done. Composition, balance and location of the light sources, the use of the 16mm UWA, avoiding the temptation to boost the saturation and the local contrast, not being afraid to "blow the highlights", etc.

What was wrong with f/11, BTW? Why f/16? Soft corners? I can see f/16 contributing to the star affect on #4 but for the rest?

Many of these compositions are very carefully done and consequently interesting to look at. The last one is brilliant, but a couple of the others also strike me as designs I would have taken an age to find – if I could find them at all.

However, the compressed subject brightness range in combination with preternatural saturation is a look I have not come to like despite years of exposure to it.

Perhaps some of the commentators here do not realise that Kolmanskop is part of the sperrgebiet (controlled environment) and one cannot access the area at all hours - this means that one cannot get in as early or stay as late as one would want ideally, which does have an impact on ideal lighting conditions

As a Namibian of birth, I would have felt that some exterior shots would be required to pass on to the reader how completely desolate and forlorn these once proud colonial buildings look in the barren Namib desert, as well as convey the vastness of the landscape and the extreme light of the African continent in that part of the world - as far as the 'indoor' shots are concerned, I feel the photographer did a pretty competent job

I thought you could get a special photographic permit allowing entry much earlier. It was certainly true in 2010. I haven't been back in Luderitz recently although I did hike the Naukluft with all its chains last year. What a hike! I also have also done the much easier Fish, another must do. It was amazing. So is Namibia.Die beste plek op aarde!

Yep, you need to buy a photo-permit. With that, you can enter the Kolmanskop area from sunrise until sunset. I've been there three times (2007, 2013 and last September). It's heartbreaking to see that this amazing historic place has badly detoriated the last couple of years; not only because of natural causes (wind, sand etc.) but mainly because 1d10ts feel the need to write their names on the walls and windows. Despite that, it's still an amazing place for taking great photos. Kudos to Mr. Marom, great shots.

Yeah the HDR gig does not do it for me. I like photos to look as though I am seeing them with my eye. Just a matter of personal taste, but the DR in a couple of those shots, in real life, looking at the shadowed back of a wall while looking straight into the sunlight, would just never look that way to the human eye, and I personally dont like that effect at all. I dont think they are leveraging the DR of the camera, but are touched up in post. Happy to be corrected if I am wrong

If HDR is done correctly, it's exactly what your eyes see when looking at a scene. Your eyes DR is much higher than a non-HDR photograph, plus the fact that your iris will open and close depending on where in the scene you focus your gaze.

I like these pics...The warm tone, the geometrical and graphical elements, the opposition between the soft curves of the sand and the straight lines of the rooms, the lighting. They look good in black and white, too... (I did the test).

These images are average quality. The composition is good but not great, the saturation levels are appropriate, but the white balance is blatantly and arbitrarily warm in many of the images. The lightingwas very poorly done in some of these images, especially #1 with the foreground being desperately needing flash and in some other images the flash was used inappropriately. Overall I would grade this a C+. I certainly could have done better with thousands of dollars worth of gear and enough money to spend all day taking pictures without having to work for a living.

Totally agree. They are nice shots, but it's 1) a great venue with natural light with the building blocking a lot of the direct sun, but 2) mediocre given the guy is using around $3,000 of body + lens equipment. My first car cost half of that. Maybe these aren't 100% quality JPG's or something. Nice shots though, I do really like the composition, but I would love to have a few hours to myself in that place. It looks like the author spent 3 days there, which isn't a luxury I have.

I've been to this location myself and must say that it isn't that difficult to come back home with the exact same shots.

Its the location that makes these pictures to be 'different', but if you have been to that exact same location and now see these pictures here as a featured story you know these pictures aren't particularly special.

I like the photos a lot, they are far better than anything I could do.

But sometimes I wonder if abandoned buildings aren't the landscape image equivalent of the street photographer's homeless person shot. A perhaps too easy and cliched way to invoke an emotional response.

It is the mother of all ghost towns, and your images are spectacular. But the subject got me thinking about the things we photograph. Weathered and lichen-covered gravestones are another powerfully poignant artifact. So are sunsets, rainbows and singing birds (my niche). Maybe everything is cliche. I'm going to have to think this through some more :)

I think it has to do with what you have in mind while shooting it. When shooting in Kolmanskop, I didn't see it as a deserted town, but rather as a unique landscape. That's why it's not a cliche to me.

I agree. Additionally, the visual textures on the architectural surfaces (particularly in the upper right of the frame) suggest, to my eye, landscape. There is a really nice tension between recognizable structure and abstracting/subverting elements.

The photos are very good. Neither are they "the best ever seen on DPReview" as claimed by Felts, nor are they "nothing special" as claimed by Gediminas 8.

They are carefully framed and well processed. My personal favourites are No 4 & No 6.

Interestingly, all but one are taken indoors and the one outdoor one does not show much of the landscape of the place. I was looking forward of some shots showing the dunes sweeping over the houses as was alluded in the text by Erez.

So my guesses are that either:

1) Erez was there in the middle of the day only when harsh light did not make for ideal landscape shooting (unless you've come packing an IR converted DSLR that is)

Hi Luben,First of all, as you must guess, I never claimed these images were the "best" of anything. That said, I'm pretty happy with them, more so since the location is limited in essence and I only spent 3 days there.As to your question, I personally like the inside much more than the outside, which is pretty dull and monotonous. I spent sunrise, midday and sunset in Kolmanskop on multiple occasions, and the main attraction, in my opinion, is the inside of the houses. The colors, the light let in through the doors and windows and the dunes are what makes this location so unique, so I concentrated on those. The correct answer is 2.

These photos are nothing special - just a documentation of abandoned houses. No special atmosphere, no eerie play of shadows and light. Finding an intriguingly-sounding location in some far away corner of the world does not amount to automatically great images.

And of course there had to be blatant advertising of the photographer's travel business at the end. They should have put it in the beginning so we'd know upfront that this is about making money not from exceptional photography but from taking naive newbies on expensive tours to exotic places.

(And no, my not sharing a stunning gallery of my own does not preclude me from pointing these things out.)

I don't think these were supposed to be eerie. I think your opinion is more the result of your expectations of what these pictures should have been colliding with what they actually are.And yes, having shared a gallery of your own certainly increases the credibility of your opinion - I mean this in the best possible manner.

No, the absence of your work to be viewed should not invalidate observation and/or criticism.

The phenomenon involved with this site will render in most cases something interesting visually regardless of more or less careful consideration of photographic method(s). But, I think the photographic considerations are fairly evident in this work; light and other elements of composition are authored far beyond what would present in a documentary snapshot.

Absence of one's work Does invalidate Negative observation!Todays world is saturated to the hilt with photographs of every kind, making it more difficult to 'view' photos objectively and reasonably. Photography is considered becoming banal and only sensationalism or highly unusual rare shots seem to pique the interests of the public that which seems to reflect the basis of your opinion and others on this section.

I agree that perception is very individual. It also reflects personal tastes in photography which tend to change with time. I think I am past the "postcard landscape" stage now (not meant in a negative way - just a personal choice) and therefore am not easily impressed by such images any more. Or maybe I have seen/attempted too many and am "burned out".

What I still stand by is how merely good - sometimes even average - photos are presented here like the Holy Grail. When I said that these photos were nothing special, I did not mean that they were bad. No, they are good technically/compositionally etc. But nothing SPECIAL. And a big story in which they are wrapped doesn't really help. Nor soliciting to sign up to a mailing list for paid workshops with pretentious names.

"Todays world is saturated to the hilt with photographs of every kind, making it more difficult to 'view' photos objectively and reasonably. Photography is considered becoming banal and only sensationalism or highly unusual rare shots seem to pique the interests of the public"

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